I tell the actors that the biggest gift they can give me is to fail. And that the second gift they can give me is to surprise me.

I've had to cut my mom out of a movie before - it's ruthless, editing. But it's also so necessary; because once you start taking away, it's like sculpture, you can really start feeling the shape of the whole.

You can never maintain just pure happiness. In my life, I want full emotion. I want equal parts happiness and sadness.

I love crosscut parallel storytelling, like we did in Blue Valentine. I love how Alejandro González Iñárritu has done it, and Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Coppola, and all the way back to D.W. Griffith - this parallel editing is an effective way to tell stories. It's like juggling, like keeping a lot of balls in the air and seeing how they come down.

I'm so sick of seeing guns in movies, and all this violence; and if there was going to be violence in Pines, I wanted it to actually be narrative violence. I wasn't interested in fetishizing violence in any way of making it feel cool or slow-motion violence. I wanted it to be just violence that affected the story.

There's something so glorious in giving control to the world. I think that's what I'm trying to do in my films-control the world but also let it be chaotic, let there be life.

I always say writing is like dreaming, shooting is like living, and editing is like murder, because you take all these gifts that actors give you, and you cut them.